Dayo Lawal

Dayo Lawal

Home Institution
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year Participated
2020

Year in School
Undergraduate

REU Faculty Mentor
Tiffani Williams

Research Area Interest
Bioinformatics and Computational Biology

Project Title

Biography & Research Abstract

Abstract:

Divergence time is a key step in most phylogenetic studies as it allows us to make connections with different events in history. MCMCTree has been the premier software to compute divergence time, but it does not scale with large data, taking a very long time. Ancestral Age is a new, quicker algorithm, but it no longer works. This project aims to fix the errors within the code. Through fixing linking errors, rebuilding the code, and rewriting many files, the build was able to compile. Currently, running Ancestral Age and bettering the interface is the plan to optimize it going on.

Bio:

My name is Dayo Lawal and I am a rising Junior. I'm a CS major at UIUC with an interest in software engineering. My languages are C++ and Java, with also a bit of python. This year, I’m going to be the corporate chair for the organization, Blacks and Africans Americans in Computing (BAAC). Outside of classes, I like to personally work on video game production, having created my own “Space Invaders” inspired video game.